Infants’ Visual-Proprioceptive Intermodal Perception With Imperfect Contingency Information Mark A. Schmuckler Derryn T. Jewell Department of Psychology, University of Toronto at Scarborough, Scarborough Ontario, Canada M1C 1A4 E-mail: marksch@utsc.utoronto.ca ABSTRACT: Two experiments explored 5-month-old infants’ recognition of self- movement in the context of imperfect contingencies between felt and seen movement. Previous work has shown that infants can discriminate a display of another child’s movements from an on-line video display of their own movements, even when featural information is removed. These earlier findings were extended by demonstrating self versus other discrimination when the visual information for movement was an unrelated object (a fluorescent mobile) directly attached to the child’s leg, thus producing imperfect spatial and temporal contingency information. In contrast, intermodal recognition failed when the mobile was indirectly attached to infants’ legs, thus eliminating spatial contingencies altogether and further weakening temporal contingencies. Together, these studies reveal that even imperfect contingency information can drive intermodal perception, given appropriate levels of spatial and temporal contingency information. ß 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 49: 387–398, 2007. Keywords: intermodal perception; visual-proprioceptive recognition; infant development INTRODUCTION In daily life individuals are barraged with information arising from multiple perceptual systems. Rather than experience this wealth of information as unconnected perceptual inputs, however, these varying sources are perceived as coherent wholes, forming unified percepts of objects and events, a process known as ‘‘intermodal perception’’ (Spelke, 1987). Understanding how such multiple inputs are coordinated has been of interest to psychologists for some time. Currently, a great deal of evidence attests to the early development of intermodal perception (for reviews, see Bushnell & Boudreau, 1991, 1993; Lewkowicz, 2000, 2001; Lewkowicz & Lickliter, 1994; Lickliter & Bahrick, 2000, 2001; Rose & Ruff, 1987), with neonates even demonstrating a form of intermodal coordination via their visual localization of an auditory sound source (Muir & Field, 1979). Generally, there is agreement that visual-auditory intermodal perception is present with the first few months (Bahrick, 1988, 2001, 2002; Bahrick, Flom, & Lickliter, 2002) and possibly even earlier (Sai, 2005), and that visual-tactile intermodal relations are operative by about 5 months of age (Bushnell & Boudreau, 1991, 1993; Rose & Ruff, 1987). 1 Received 16 February 2006; Accepted 9 December 2006 Correspondence to: M. A. Schmuckler Contract grant sponsor: Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/dev.20214 ß 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1 Reports of visual-tactile intermodal perception by much younger infants (i.e., neonates to 1-month-old), such as Gibson and Walker (1984), Kaye and Bower (1994), and Meltzoff and Borton (1979), have come under attack in recent years (Maurer, Stager, & Mondloch, 1999). Given the extremely careful failure to replicate Meltzoff and Borton’s (1979) results by Maurer et al. (1999), and the somewhat obvious conceptual and procedural flaws of Kaye and Bower (1994), this leaves only the classic study by Gibson and Walker (1984) as unassailable evidence of intermodal perception in very young infants. As such, a conservative conclusion might be that the visual-tactile intermodal abilities of infants younger than 5–6 months are, at best, unclear.